Topics - JeGX

Designing a big city that players can explore by day and by night while improving on the unique visual from the first Mirror’s Edge game isn’t an easy task.

In this talk, the tools and technology used to render Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst will be discussed. From the physical sky to the reflection tech, the speakers will show how they tamed the new Frostbite 3 PBR engine to deliver realistic images with stylized visuals.They will talk about the artistic and technical challenges they faced and how they tried to overcome them, from the simple light settings and Enlighten workflow to character shading and color grading.

This release is packed with many new features and numerous performance optimizations. Performance has been a big focus for us as we prepare to ship our next game, Paragon. Several new rendering and animation features focused on rendering realistic characters are in 4.11, as are new audio features and tools improvements. UE4 continues to push VR forward with improvements to VR rendering and support for the latest SDKs so that you can ship your games as VR hardware becomes available to consumers.

Microsoft is reaching out to Linux developers in a way that the company never has before. "The Bash shell is coming to Windows. Yes, the real Bash is coming to Windows," said Microsoft's Kevin Gallo on stage at today's Build 2016 keynote. The announcement received an uproarious applause from the crowd. The new functionality will be enabled as part of this summer's Anniversary Update to Windows 10.

At Microsoft’s Build Conference this morning, the company said it will soon deliver on a promise made even before Xbox One’s launch – to allow devs to use any Xbox One as a dev kit.

The ability to develop games using Windows 10 and any retail Xbox One, in theory, significantly lowers the barrier to console game development, which is historically the highest-walled garden in the commercial game industry.

The free upcoming one-year Windows 10 anniversary update this summer will enable the full release for Xbox One dev kit functionality.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. This release focuses on stability and on responding to the feedback we’ve received on RTM and Update 1.

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C++ Compiler

In this release, we've updated the C++ compiler and standard library with enhanced support for C++11 and C++14 features, as well as preliminary support for certain features expected to be in the C++17 standard. The most notable compiler changes are support for Variable Templates and constexpr improvements.

Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 allows using /SDL with /AWAIT. We also removed /RTC limitation with Coroutines. Coroutines still are experimental, but ready for quality production code now.

Additionally, we've fixed more than 300 compiler bugs, including many submitted by customers through Microsoft Connect — thank you!

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C++ IDE

The new SQLite-based database engine is now being used by default. This will speed up database operations like Go To Definitions and Find All References, and will significantly improve initial solution parse time. The setting has been moved to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Advanced (it was formerly under ...C/C++ -> Experimental).

- Installed or played games sometimes do not show up in the Radeon™ Settings "Gaming" tab.- Installing via command line may not work for some users. As a workaround please use the default GUI installer.- Intermittent hang sometimes experienced on UE4 applications.- Black screen or possible hang after launching Oculus Video Application.- DirectX 12 application frame rates are no longer locked to the refresh rate of the display panel.

At Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft held a panel to illustrate the latest advancements in DirectX 12 technology:

The adoption of DirectX 12 is huge among developers, with many more games being worked on.

Microsoft is working on improving stability and performance of the API.

The team is working on a concept called procedural textures, which is a new hardware feature that lets developers vary dynamically the amount of pixels rendered in a particular screen area, controlling performance by varying the image quality of individual parts of a frame independently of the rest of the screen.

Most importantly though the new flagship would not have HBM2 memory. Card is allegedly equipped with 8GB GDDR5X memory, which basically means HBM2 will have to wait for Pascal GP100. Now does it make sense? Technically yes, because mass production of HBM2 modules is not expected to begin sooner than third quarter. FinFET GPU production is probably doing much better than HBM production, so NVIDIA could have taken a safe route that would protect them from any possible issues with HBM production. So rather than wait for new memory chips, NVIDIA is going to use known technology and focus exclusively on new power efficient 16nm FF node.

According to SweClockers’ sources NVIDIA might be ready to unveil its new architecture at Computex 2016 (May 31st – June 4th). However if any difficulties are met on new TSMC 16nm FinFET process, this launch could transform to paper launch.

A barrier is a new concept exposed to developers which was previously hidden inside the driver. If you think synchronization, you’re not too far off, as this is also part of what a barrier is.The synchronization part is well known for CPUs: you have multiple writer threads updating a buffer, then you synchronize to make sure all writes have finished, and then you can process the data with multiple reader threads. However, that’s not all there is to a GPU barrier (ResourceBarrier and vkCmdPipelineBarrier).

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Related to barriers are fences (CreateFence and vkCreateFence), which are required to synchronize the CPU with the GPU as well as different queues on GPUs. A fence is a very heavyweight synchronization primitive as it requires the GPU to flush all caches at least, and potentially some additional synchronization. Due to those costs, fences should be used sparingly. In particular, try to group per-frame resources and track them together with a single fence instead of fine-grained per-resource tracking. For instance, all commands buffers used in one frame should be protected by one fence, instead of one fence per command buffer.

But first some caveats: The Talos Principle is technically the first game with Vulkan support, but it's currently being beta-tested. The Talos Principle also isn't designed to use the CPU utilisation and draw call improvements that are central to Vulkan, unlike Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity demo does with DX12. Furthermore, the new Vulkan drivers from AMD and Nvidia are also both in beta testing. In short, take these benchmark results with a large pinch of salt.

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Essentially, in GPU bound scenarios like higher than 1080p gaming, Vulkan isn't all that different to OpenGL. But as soon as the CPU is taxed a little more, like at 1080p and lower resolutions, there's a clear uplift in performance.